Congress, do your job on VA scandal
The Obama administration wants to be clear: they’re very, very angry over the dysfunctional state of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where reports of falsified wait lists and delayed care at VA medical centers are growing into a national scandal for the executive branch.
Specifically, administration officials say they’re “mad as hell.” That’s how VA Secretary Eric Shinseki described his response to the scandal in testimony to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week.
Of course, what’s lost in this contrived and cynical display of outrage from the president and his VA secretary is the fact that they’re the ones responsible for the agency’s performance. If the VA isn’t working, they should be working to fix it—not telling us how angry it makes them, like a pair of passive observers to the scene.
If anyone should be “madder than hell” right now, it’s the veterans and their families who are suffering from VA’s poor service and performance.
We also now know that these problems were raised with the administration during the presidential transition in 2008. The president and Sec. Shinseki knew about the problems then – red tape, wait times, uneven care – and yet did not fix the problems. Instead, together they made the problem worse; exploding the VA budget without demanding commensurate improvements in performance.
We’re beyond the point when expressing outrage, or long drawn-out investigations, at VA can be considered a constructive response. We know what the problems are; it’s time for action.
This week, members of Congress will have an opportunity to set the department on the right course, by voting for the VA Management Accountability Act of 2014 (H.R. 4031). They should waste no time in passing this necessary reform.
The bill’s aim is simple — to restore accountability to a department where the leadership and bureaucracy have come to show an alarming indifference to their mission of timely and quality service to veterans. By empowering the VA secretary to fire and replace those executives who fail to perform, the VA Management Accountability Act is an important step toward righting the ship. Right now it’s nearly impossible to fire bad managers at VA, and therefore nearly impossible to hold leaders accountable.
It’s difficult to overstate the seriousness of the problems at VA.
In recent weeks, we’ve learned that officials at various VA medical facilities around the nation have been falsifying patient wait lists, essentially “cooking the books” to make it appear that veterans are receiving timely care. In reality, patients were waiting months for appointments—and in many cases, dying while waiting on “secret lists.”
In Phoenix, where the scandal broke, the retired VA doctor who blew the whistle on the fraud estimates perhaps 40 veterans died while waiting for care on the secret wait list. An investigation is in progress, and criminal charges for VA officials involved in the alleged fraud are a real possibility. Regardless of criminal charges and investigations—both of which should happen—we know this: the system is infected and needs systemic reform.
It’s against this backdrop that the need for stronger accountability controls at VA has become clear. While the department has suffered a string of scandals and performance failures, the current leadership has taken no steps to shake up the leadership team and force change. (The ritual sacrifice on May 16 of Dr. Robert Petzel, VA undersecretary for health care, was a sham—Petzel had already announced he was planning to retire in a few months.)
Greater accountability will serve as a spur to improved performance at VA. The department suffers from a “widespread and systemic lack of accountability,” Rep. Jeff Miller, said when he introduced H.R. 4031 in February. But he also noted that the department has many able and professional employees, who would benefit from stronger accountability controls to weed out poor performers.
“While the vast majority of VA’s more than 300,000 employees and executives are dedicated and hard-working,” Miller said, “the department’s well-documented reluctance to ensure its leaders are held accountable for mistakes is tarnishing the reputation of the organization and may actually be encouraging more veteran suffering instead of preventing it.”
The bill now has significant bipartisan support in the House of Representatives, with 118 members signed on as co-sponsors. That’s a good start, and other members of Congress should now join in supporting the bill’s passage. It’s time.
If anyone deserves to be “madder than hell” right now, it’s the veterans and their families who are suffering from VA’s poor service and performance. In the absence of leadership from the executive branch, it’s put up or shut up time for Congress. It’s time to do right by our veterans by restoring accountability to VA.
Pete Hegseth is a Fox News contributor. He is the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America and the former executive director of Vets for Freedom. He is an infantry officer in the Army National Guard and has served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. Learn more at: www.concernedveteransforamerica.org.
WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 veterans — 10% of all the Veterans Affairs patients — continue to wait a month or more for appointments at VA hospitals and clinics, according to data obtained by USA TODAY.
The VA has made some progress in dealing with the backlog of cases that forced former secretary Eric Shinseki to retire early this year. For instance, the VA substantially cut the overall number of worst-case scenarios for veterans — those who had waited more than four months for an appointment. That figure dropped from 120,000 in May to 23,000 in October. Much of that improvement occurred because patients received care from private providers.
Since May, the VA has been reduced the number of veterans waiting longest for care — its top priority — by 57%, according to James Hutton, a VA spokesman. From June to September, the VA completed 19 million appointments, an increase of 1.2 million compared with the same time last year.
“VA’s goal continues to be to provide timely, high-quality healthcare for veterans,” Hutton said in a statement. “Veterans and VA employees nationwide understand the need for reform, and VA is committed to putting these reforms into place. And while we have significantly improved capacity and access to care, we have not yet achieved our intended state — systemic and timely access across the board. It will be an ongoing and significant effort to reach our goals.”
To recruit more health care providers, VA Secretary Robert McDonald has proposed pay hikes for VA doctors and dentists, Hutton said. McDonald announced a restructuring of the VA on Nov. 10.
The new data show that dozens of hospitals and clinics leave a quarter or more of all their patients waiting 30 days or more for an appointment.
• Some facilities still have extremely long wait times for basic care, including 64 that have average wait times over 60 days for new patients seeking primary care. They include major facilities, such as hospitals in Baltimore; Jacksonville, Fla.; Temple, Texas, and Atlanta. All have at least 30,000 pending appointments.?
In Jacksonville, the average new patient is left waiting 77 days, a fact that previously obscured in the VA’s data because it was averaged into the much-better performance of the nearby Gainesville hospital. Jacksonville only sees two-thirds of its patients within 30 days, the worst rate of any major facility in the VA system.
The VA is hiring more staff to deal with those delays, Hutton said.
• Ten facilities reported waits of more than three months for a new patient to see a specialist. At the top of the list: the Westmoreland, Pa., clinic, where patients are waiting 174 days — nearly six months — for a specialty appointment.
Thirty-three facilities have kept new patients seeking a mental-health appointments waiting for at least two months. Among those are large hospitals in Martinsburg, W.Va., Amarillo, Texas, and Tuskegee, Ala. And 10 clinics and hospitals kept established patients waiting at least three weeks longer than the patients wanted for mental health appointments.
• Some small locations have big waiting times, too. The Wagner, S.D., clinic near the Nebraska state line, has only 155 total appointments of any type pending — and its new patient wait time is 153 days.
The data looks at nearly 6 million appointments until Oct. 1 and scheduled through Veterans Health Administration.
Members of Congress continue to express dissatisfaction with the delays in disciplining VA employees involved in covering up the long wait times.
“The events of the last year have proven that far too many senior VA leaders have lied, manipulated data, or simply failed to do the job for which they were hired,” said Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican and chairman of House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, during a hearing Thursday. “It is also clear that VA’s attempt to instill accountability for these leaders has been both nearly non-existent and rife with self-inflicted roadblocks to real reform.”
